A Warning for Some, Entertainment for Others

Delivering on its promise to take people into the path of hurricanes makes the Weather Channel a must for viewers, who tune in to see storm coverage and wind-battered reporters.

BRIAN STELTER

NAGS HEAD, N.C. — Standing where he warned others not to tread, the beach on the Outer Banks during Hurricane Irene’s landfall, Mike Seidel had sand in his teeth, his pockets and his ears. He was soaking wet, barely able to hear — and he was beaming.

“We haven’t missed a live shot in three hours!” he exclaimed while trying to stand up on the battered beach here in his seventh hour of live television reporting. A minute later, he was back on the Weather Channel, where he would stay for a total of 15 hours on Saturday, seeing, feeling and tasting the storm several times each hour as a surrogate for viewers and a guide for evacuees.

Yes, what Mr. Seidel does may seem crazy at times, but most important for him and for his bosses, it is compelling TV — the Weather Channel’s ratings are never higher than when a hurricane is making landfall. Like Home Depot selling plywood for windows or Wal-Mart selling jugs of water, the Weather Channel sells coverage of weather-related disasters. Delivering on its promise to take people into the path of Mother Nature is what makes the channel a must-carry for cable systems across the United States, and what allows it to sell so many storm-related ads to insurance companies and home improvement stores before, during and after storms.

Commercials over the weekend urged viewers to “come back” after the storm coverage.

It is harder than it looks, staying on live television during a hurricane. But Mr. Seidel, a meteorologist by training, lives for it. After 10 hours on the air, when Eileen Winslow, a senior assignment editor, called to ask whether he wanted a break, he said firmly, “I don’t want any down time. Not till it ends.”

There are ways to show hurricane conditions safely, he says — by not going too far into the water, for instance, like some local television reporters did on Saturday, increasing their chances of being tugged out to sea by the current. Still, it briefly became dangerous for Mr. Seidel’s camera crew here at mid-afternoon on Saturday, as the core of the storm punched through the nearby Albemarle Sound.

It took three men to hold down the camera, which was perched on a slippery second-floor deck, peering down at Mr. Seidel on the wet beach. The crew feared the deck railing might fly away, so they moved to a safer third-floor balcony, eating up 45 minutes of broadcasting time. A different section of the deck railing did, indeed, collapse an hour later.

Hurricane Irene was an especially wide storm system, affecting an exceptionally high number of people on the East Coast, so television images served as a warning to people in harm’s way, and entertainment for those who were not.

All of the major television networks extended hours of news programming over the weekend; they knew that although some viewers laughed at images of reporters being blown over by winds, they were definitely watching. They were accused by many of overhyping the storm, but as the longtime anchor for NBC’s New York station, Chuck Scarborough, said on air on Sunday, “We’re in the news business. We deal in doom.”

For Irene, Mr. Seidel first flew to Palm Beach, Fla., for live shots on Monday, when the hurricane was threatening Florida. He moved to North Carolina on Wednesday. Finally, as the storm made landfall on Saturday about 80 miles south-southwest of here, there was news to report.

Mr. Seidel started broadcasting at 5 a.m. from the second-floor deck of the Comfort Inn in South Nags Head, purposely positioning himself away from the protection of the building to show the most serious winds. Sometimes he’d have to stand there, silently braced against the deck railing, just so the channel could show he was there — what he called a “bobble-head” shot.

In between live shots he wiped the rain off his face with a white towel and studied the radar on his laptop. But he spent more time outside than in.

At noon, when Mr. Seidel asked for a bathroom break, his producer, Melody Taylor, joked, “Is that allowed, really?”

She added, “The last time I asked for 10 minutes for you, they were calling me in three.”

NBC owns part of the Weather Channel, so the two share resources, like a satellite truck, which was used simultaneously by Mr. Seidel’s crew and an NBC crew on Saturday. Mr. Seidel also showed up on MSNBC and local NBC stations when he was not on the Weather Channel.

The constant live shots did not allow for any reporting outside the hotel, but NBC producers gave him updates after driving around the island. Wind damage was minimal on Nags Head.

During the day, inconveniences piled up. Water poured from the ceiling of the makeshift newsroom. Cable and Internet service disappeared. Mr. Seidel and his cameraman, Michael Gemelli, struggled to communicate while on the air. The audio operator, Doug Suttle, had to help keep the camera stationary.

But the crew said that by hurricane standards, they fared quite well; though the satellite truck experienced “rain fade,” meaning that the signal was sometimes lost when the rain turned torrential, the dish was able to stay up most of the day.

“That’s the key: truck protection,” Mr. Seidel said both before and after the storm. NBC’s truck and three others were parked behind the hotel, as if hiding from Irene’s easterly winds.

When the winds shifted direction after the eye wall passed, the crew switched to a Skype-and-wireless-phone set-up for the last two hours of live shots. Mr. Seidel wrapped at 7:40 p.m. as darkness set in. (The 12 hours of strongest winds affected Nags Head during daylight — a blessing for TV crews.)

There are tricks to the trade: Mr. Seidel donned safety glasses on the beach to help keep sand out of his eyes, and positioned himself almost as low as a football linebacker to stop from being blown over. The audio engineer wrapped his battery pack in a condom to keep it dry.

Mr. Seidel, a weather geek since age 6 when he started measuring the snow in Salisbury, Md., first covered a hurricane for the Weather Channel in 1996, when Hurricane Edouard blew onto Cape Cod. Back then, the channel was available in fewer homes and devoted a lot less time to breaking weather news.

Now, Mr. Seidel is live on location more days than he is home in Atlanta. Treating Mr. Seidel like an athlete, the Weather Channel flashed his statistics on the screen on Saturday: Irene was his 51st tropical weather event.

“People tune in, I think, to live vicariously through us,” Mr. Seidel said in a pre-storm interview. “I’m doing a play by play, but its really all about the pictures.”

For some inexperienced and ambitious reporters, such storm coverage is an important line on the résumé, prompting them to take risks that Mr. Seidel mocks just like many viewers do. “One-hundred-fifteen-mile-per-hour gusts? Where do they get this stuff?” he said around 10 a.m., reacting to a local television report that was almost assuredly false.

The thought lingered in the air: maybe more reporters need meteorology degrees and science backgrounds like Mr. Seidel.

On Saturday, Mr. Seidel said that being out on the beach, oddly, was safer than being by buildings. “You’re only going to get hit by wind and sand” on the beach, he said. And hit he was, with sand and surf in 50- to 60-mile-per-hour winds all afternoon. For a first-timer, it was bearable for no more than five minutes. “I’m starting to feel it now,” Mr. Seidel admitted in hour No. 11.

On Sunday morning, his body ached, but he was in good spirits. Irene, he said, had given him an “atmospheric dermabrasion.”

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